Friendships are finally getting their due. Once relegated to a distant third position after life partners and children, a spate of new books are spotlighting the importance of friends. And research shows that people with close friends are healthier – both emotionally...
Purpose Prize
The Latest from CoGenerate
An Intergenerational Approach to Getting Families Housed in Santa Barbara
Lyiam Galo is the co-director of Generations United for Service, a program of the Northern Santa Barbara County United Way and one of 10 awardees of the CoGen Challenge to Advance Economic Opportunity. Watch for interviews with all 10 of these innovators bringing...
Utilizing Faith-Owned Land to Strengthen Intergenerational Community in Seattle
E.N. West is the co-founder and lead organizer of the Faith Land Initiative of the Church Council of Greater Seattle, one of 10 awardees of the CoGen Challenge to Advance Economic Opportunity. Watch for interviews with all 10 of these innovators bringing older and...
*
Timothy W. Bilodeau
Purpose Prize Fellow 2013
Bilodeau’s Medicines for Humanity provides access to basic healthcare and medicines to hundreds of thousands of children under 5.
As a volunteer working to improve medical conditions in Ecuador, Timothy Bilodeau stood by a mother whose 3-year-old child had just died for lack of 25 cents worth of medicine. The impoverished woman, in agony, had been forced to choose between buying food or medicine for her child, and had chosen food. “No parent should have to make that choice,” says Bilodeau, 63. Yet, an estimated 7 million children under 5 years old – 20,000 a day – die worldwide from causes that can be treated or prevented.
Bilodeau was the former owner of a healthcare recruiting business but moved on because he “sensed a lack of meaning in life.” This launched him on his encore career, at first providing medications for poor children, until an “epiphany” in the Dominican Republic caused Bilodeau to realize that medicines alone would not solve the problem, that preventive and follow-up care and parent education were essential to giving children a chance to survive and thrive.
In 2003, Medicines for Humanity was born to develop systems of care that would identify and reach the most vulnerable children. The organization works with local communities in Angola, Cameroon, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Kenya, and Rwanda, and has provided health services to more than 400,000 children so far.
“I don’t do this work because it gives me satisfaction,” Bilodeau says. “I do it because I have to. Such is my ‘encore life’ – and I wouldn’t trade it for any other.”